Does anyone know how much storage I’ll need for a 50# bag of wheat berries? It looks like Breadtopia sells a 35# bag in a 5 gallon bucket, so does this mean a gallon of storage equals about 7#s of wheat berries?
I’m thinking of getting some of these buckets:
https://www.usplastic.com/catalog/item.aspx?itemid=37833&catid=
Thanks!
Size-wise I don’t have any information to offer you, but I will say that we once stored dog food in a plastic bucket like that in our garage and rats ate right through it! So we switched to metal. Sorry to sound alarmist. Not sure where you plan to store yours, or if rats even like grains. We bought a nice metal one at Ace Hardware if I recall.
Thanks. It will be stored in my apartment (hopefully away from rats!).
I vacuum pack my bulk grain, beans, etc. in gallon sized glass jars. No plastic, no rats.
~ irene
I recently bought a 50 lb bag of durum and it ended up filling just less than 7x 1 gallon mylar bags. So if you get a 7 gallon bucket, you should have some room to spare.
I keep a LOT of grain in my home as I am an avid bread baker and homebrewer. The two basic types of storage I use are food-grade plastic 5-gallon buckets with Gamma threaded lids. I can fit 22-25 pounds of malted barley in a bucket. I also have a 60-lb Vittles Vault from Gamma which is marketed primarily for pet food, but it is food-safe plastic that’s perfectly fine for storing grain. I buy 50 lb bags of hard wheat. It’s really larger than needed, but an advantage to that is that it doesn’t need to be empty to top it up with another bag of wheat. This sits underneath the shelf of the stainless steel table which holds my Mockmill, so it’s very convenient. It has the same style of threaded lid that I use for the buckets. There’s a gasket, so both types of containers are air-tight.
The Vittles Vault was only $21 from Amazon on sale. It is claimed to be stackable, but I say that’s untrue. I think the buckets are sturdier and more likely to deter rodents, but they’re both plastic, so neither is invulnerable. There a 6-gallon plastic buckets which would be a great size for splitting a 50-pound bags into two buckets with a little room to spare. The buckets stack extremely well, so you can store a lot of grain in little floor space. With the bail handle and a weight of 25-pounds, I can manage a stack of 5 of these, full, with no worries.
6-gallon buckets: https://pleasanthillgrain.com/six-6-gallon-buckets-plastic-food-safe
We have a baker and a homebrewer in my house too, and a big dog lol. That’s good to know about the Vittles Vaults not being stackable. My homebrewer spouse had rec’d those at one point, but I went with these from here/Breadtopia.
Now he’s been slowly replacing his buckets that are a hassle to open and close with these too. His honey for mead is still in the bucket that seems to require a mallet to close. (I pull from that bucket for my granola making.)
Any 5-gal. bucket made from food-grade material will hold about 35 lb. of grain, leaving about 15 lb. to stow in another container or leave in the bag (all rolled up) to be used first. A 7-gal. bucket would probably hold a 50-lb. bag of grain, but the container would weigh over 50 lb. and be that much harder to move from place to place or lift on top of another bucket for organized storage, until some of the content is used.
I use an alternative method for storing grain before milling. I have a second upright freezer that our children purchased for us back in 2016. I just store my grain in there as well as my poultry and fish. I probably have about 30 pounds of assorted grain in there. Works for me!
Leah
“Any 5-gal. bucket made from food-grade material will hold about 35 lb. of grain”
Good to know. Apparently unmalted grain is heavier, which makes sense since even light Pilsner malts are kilned. So, the 5-gallon buckets are probably a better size than the 6-gallon ones after all.
I use these Life Latch lids on my buckets and am very happy with them. I just want to pass on the warning to people not to over tighten. If you really crank them down, they can be a real pain to get open again.
Also I’ve had the rubber gasket on one of them fail (I think it got caught funny in the closure and got stretched). You can replace them with the replacement o-rings sold for 12" Gamma Seal lids. These can be found on ebay.
Also good for smaller amounts of grain are metal ammo boxes. You can get these on Amazon.